Will Music NFTs have their PFP moment?

KingData ·2022-06-30

Original author: Water & Music
This article is from The SeeDAO

2021 will see the launch of new generative music NFT projects, sparking a rethinking of traditional industries’ notions of celebrity, creativity, fan engagement and intellectual property. However, due to various technical, legal and cultural reasons, the consumer demand or financial advantages of music projects relative to the popular generative visual projects have not yet been realized.

The Water & Music community has completed a series of research reports "The State of Music and Web3" in the past two months. This report consists of five parts. This is the first part. We list the contributors (sorted by role) who gave clues to our research on the problem of generating music NFTs at the end of the article.

This is perhaps one of the most compelling themes in the history of media and technology, as Marshall McLuhan put it, "the medium is the message." That is, the way people express themselves—and, in turn, the way others perceive that expression—is shaped by the medium of expression.

For better or worse, this dynamic has played a defining role in every step in the evolution of the mainstream music industry in the past. A big reason why, even in the era of streaming, commercially released albums typically still last 40 to 50 minutes is that a 12-inch 33-rpm vinyl record can hold about 22 minutes of music per side, for a total of about 45 minutes. Likewise, songwriters now routinely adjust the structure of their songs to match Spotify's playlist algorithm. For example, moving the hook of the song (the most hooking part of the song) forward, reducing the chance of being skipped by the algorithm, so as not to fall behind in the Spotify playlist sorting. More recently, the virality of short-video apps like TikTok has further cemented this mindset in the industry, making 15-second earworms a staple of music creation. In all of these cases, the distribution channel has a direct impact on the creative schedule.

If it is indeed true that the medium is the message, what is the unique musical language of Web3? In other words, what types of creative processes does blockchain technology uniquely encourage and enable? What can we expect from the encrypted version of the 15-second hook?

Perhaps the most visible examples of Web3-native creativity today come from the visual world. From CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks in 2017 to Bored Ape Yacht Club and SquiggleDAO in 2021, these financially successful NFT projects all stem from a common creative template - using code to generate hundreds of thousands of unique pieces of art Artifacts, which have a basic visual characteristic and varying degrees of rarity, can be verified and monetized on-chain. On social networks, people generally refer to these items as "PFPs" ("picture for proof", or "profile picture"), because using these NFTs on social media can identify themselves as belonging to a particular , a unique group of collectors. These projects are often generative, i.e. relying on code (on-chain or off-chain) to create a large number of visual digital assets in a short period of time, rather than having a specific artist handcraft each digital asset.

Slowly but surely, we're seeing musicians share a similar mindset, leveraging Web3 to experiment with large-scale, distributed music and audio creation. The Water & Music community has identified nearly 30 music-themed generative/PFP NFT projects launching this year - from Holly Herndon's groundbreaking Holly+ speech synthesis project; to one-off generative audiovisual NFT collections such as Invocation (Telefon Tel Aviv x EFFIXX) and Rituals (Justin Boreta x Aaron Penne); to more standard PFP type projects like TROLLz by 6ix9ine and Trippie Headz by Trippie Redd. (Water & Music members can go to the Music / Encrypted Data Dashboard to access the full list of generated / PFP music projects in one of the new, members-exclusive tabs.)

What makes these generative/PFP music projects particularly exciting is not only that they drive the interweaving of fandom and creativity, bringing fringe or niche ideas previously centered around crowdsourced creativity and distributed brand equity to the masses, but also Because Web3 has the potential to enable these creative projects to find dynamic, innovative and sustainable business models that would otherwise not be economically sustainable.

That said, the reality is that the social and financial value of generative/PFP music NFT series has yet to reach the same level of continued success as their visual counterparts. This may come as a surprise to say: music has benefited directly from the Web3 wave in other ways (mainly via one-off NFT releases), and music is increasingly visual in modern expression, no longer an inherent cultural and social forms of art.

The core issues we want to explore in this article are not only the trends of Web3 native music PFP projects so far this year, but also the challenges of scaling these projects to the mass level. Through our market research and interviews with several founders of music-generating NFT projects, we found that closing this market gap is not as simple as copying and pasting routine operations from the visual world to the music world. In fact, it may require a rethinking of the entire traditional music industry around notions of celebrity, intellectual property, and fan engagement. While all the technologies to enable generative/PFP music NFTs are in place, the social, cultural and legal foundations arguably do not yet exist.

We explore this argument by formulating the following questions in turn:

More historical background on generative music creation, why it matters to music, and why it makes sense for generative music artists to adopt Web3.

Analyze the technical soundness of generative/PFP music NFT projects - specifically, how well certain strategies used in visual PFP projects such as Bored Ape and CryptoPunks perform on music collections.

Delve into the social, cultural, and legal challenges faced by generative music NFT projects, and the unique experimental opportunities these challenges offer artists.

Creative background: generative music composer as "gardener"

Famous artist and producer Brian Eno coined the term "generative music" in the 1990s to describe a systems-based paradigm of music creation in which composers build some kind of automaton (i.e., a pre-programmed self-operating system), Generate music on your own, rather than humans creating a discrete piece of work directly with sound. Eno draws inspiration from contemporary scientific thinking at the time, including cybernetics, nonlinear systems theory, and chaos theory—the key consensus among which is that even the simplest systems can produce complex behavior. A set of rules, if adjusted just right, can have far-reaching and unforeseen creative potential.

Inspired by these ideas, Eno reported a fundamental shift in his thinking in the early 1970s, from an "architect" to a "gardener" in his understanding of the composer of music. As he shared in a 2011 interview, it was "a shift in the idea of ​​a composer: from someone who is at the top of the process and dictates exactly how it goes, to someone at the bottom of the process, well-chosen, well-chosen People who nurture and want them to grow into something.” In other words, in this new paradigm, the composer’s job is to provide the material for the creation, not the finished product, without even a clear set of instructions.

Importantly, it is not necessary to use a computer to generate music. Eno's groundbreaking ambient music album, Discreet Music, used asynchronous tape loops to allow pre-recorded material to create endless novel combinations; Steve Reich used a similar approach in It's Gonna Rain to stunning effect. But computers are clearly the ideal medium for designing generative automata, and as any programmer will tell you, the fruits of programming are all about abstraction, and creating music by creating a system that creates music is just a higher level Just abstract. More recently, apps like Endel, Boomi, and Jean-Michel Jarre's EōN have attempted to bring these computerized-generated and adaptive music experiences to more mainstream fans, often raising millions at risk in the process capital funds.

In the Web3 community, the term "generate" is widely used in art projects, which commonly use code to produce a large number of unique objects on the blockchain. The simplest form of "generating" blockchain artwork is probably PFP-forward, which mixes and matches different features onto a cartoon avatar, such as BAYC. But in these cases, the algorithm simply compiled a limited combination of prefab elements, which did not meet the original definition of "generated" by artists like Eno. On the other hand, portfolios like deafbeef and Tyler Hobbs' Fidenzas, both the work and the code that creates the work are seen as amazing artistic creations.

Making creative generative music more accessible and acceptable to a wider mainstream audience remains a challenge. First, even on-chain creative code is often rendered through the browser by off-chain codebases such as p5.js for Audioglyphs and Art Blocks. And compared to the high-quality studio productions fans are accustomed to consuming, the audio output from these libraries still sounds rough, so don't even think about making people pay for it.

Nonetheless, in the context of blockchain and NFTs, generative creations will continue to fill the void in their market as long as collectors want more unique pieces and creators don’t have time to craft them by hand. In this respect, it may be similar to other cheap manufacturing methods—only it goes beyond mass production, and even generative algorithms are considered art in their own right.

What makes Web3 particularly compelling as a potential distribution layer on top of a generative music experience is that it can make both the specific music output and the formula behind it collectible - since in most of these projects the underlying generative Both logic/script and final result are stored on-chain. This aligns with the main collection motivation of most generative NFT projects. If an on-chain art piece has the code needed to render it, it feels more durable.

Basic mechanics of generating musical NFTs: rarity, blind box minting and burning

In some generative music NFT projects, if the goal is to reproduce the financial success of visual type projects, let's analyze which features and elements of visual PFP projects can be well carried over to music projects.

On a technical level, much of this adoption is justified and is already being done. For example, a common element in visual PFP projects is assigning a relative rarity to different visual or character elements (eg clothing, hair color) that may be incorporated into the final artwork. Rarity is a key factor for cryptocurrency enthusiasts to compare and price their NFTs with each other, and there is even a small industry around cryptocurrency brands helping to generate rarity tables for their NFT collections. Many generative music NFT projects, such as SoundArts (above), have implemented a rarity-based approach, whereby developers assign each merged audio track (stem) a rarity rating to demonstrate the generative creation process for that collection of music NFTs.

Another mechanism that many generative music NFT projects have carried over from the visual world is blind-box minting, where collectors first buy an NFT without knowing the exact combination of features or rarity of the NFT they will get. For example, artist Julian Mudd's Muddy collection allows collectors to mint a total of 1,000 generative NFTs around his song "Growing Pains", each NFT having 1 There are thousands of possibilities, and collectors can only know all the details after purchasing, and determine which unique derivative combination it is. (A static original version of "Growing Pains" is available on Spotify and other streamers.)

Typically, blind-box minting projects trigger a "disclosure" of basic rarity information after all NFTs are minted or after the minting period ends (whichever occurs first). According to this design, the blind box minting process is very similar to buying a loot box in a video game, or a lottery ticket in real life.

“I think there’s a weird sense of excitement about not knowing what you’re getting when you mint coins. That feeling — we mint the same price, but what I’m drawing might be worth more — digs out that we like to gamble psychological mechanisms,” Patrick Price (aka Patty G) said in an interview. He is the founder of the upcoming project 3Q Collectibles, which works with producers who produce the underlying merged audio tracks that create the basis for generative audio NFTs with built-in rarity rankings.

In the field of generative music NFTs, we are starting to see the emergence of a third mechanism: giving collectors the ability to burn tokens (that is, completely and irreversibly destroy them from the supply) to reduce the number of original assets, for the purpose of "creation" "Collections create additional scarcity. As a performance art work, digital artist Pak has launched a dedicated website burn.art, where any collector can burn any NFT they own in exchange for the token $ASH, which can then be used to further exchange for Pak's own collection of NFTs.

EulerBeats, the flagship generative NFT project in the music field, designed the airdrop like this: 27 one-to-one genesis "LPs". According to the terms of service of the project, each Genesis LP has 120 copies (or "prints"), which are sold according to the bonding curve (i.e., the price is automatically increased with each sale), 8% of the print sales go to the Genesis LP holder, 2% Goes to EulerBeats, and the remaining 90% goes to the combustion reserve. Further gamification architecture design provides an opportunity for NFT owners to burn the original print in exchange for 90% of that print's current value.

Social, Cultural and Legal Challenges

For generative/PFP music NFT projects, while the above strategies are technically feasible, whether the paradigm is socially, culturally, and legally envisioned at scale is another matter entirely.

Assessing the potential market for generative/PFP music NFT collections, not only financially, but also philosophically: why do people enjoy listening to and sharing music in the first place? As an innate social art form, music is arguably more valuable the more you share it - so, do people necessarily want to own a unique piece of music, or do they all want to share and experience the same piece of music? When it seems like you can mass-produce multiple different versions of music with the push of a button (even though the artist may have put a lot more effort behind the scenes to build the system), will the relationship of fans to music change? How does the traditional top-down notion of celebrity branding — where fans follow artists because they have unique personalities and voices that cannot be replicated — map subtly onto a decentralized infrastructure?

01 Lack of social utility

Generally speaking, one of the strongest psychological appeals of generative/PFP projects is the ability to bring collectors together under some sort of umbrella community. SoundArts founder Paris Blohm told us in an interview: "Generating PFP is a perfect example of both commonality and uniqueness." Taking BAYC as an example, Brian Nguyen, founding member of SoundArts, added: "We are all Apes, but we are It has its own identity in this community.”

In our database, many music-generating NFT projects tend to view NFT ownership as a similar intrinsic community element as a way to access and govern their specific DAOs (Holly+, Mudd DAO, BeetsDAO, and BleepsDAO are a few important cases) . “We see the possibility of building a new kind of fan club by generating NFTs, where NFT holders can receive future airdrops from artists to watch their performances,” experimental music/art structures So Lab X, Sound Obsessed and IN X Kalam Ali, co-founder of SPACE, told us in an interview, “It’s a new format for an artist or a band to release a massive series of NFTs and then build a fan base based on the NFTs the fans have. We can see this Form creativity, while also having good financial potential, such as using generated NFTs in metaverse events to replace merchandise or even tickets.”

That said, these community experiences are largely built by Web3-native artists and collectors, while also serving themselves. For various cultural and technical reasons, the mainstream social utility of generative/PFP music NFTs remains far below their visual counterparts.

First, music is inherently harder to navigate than visual art. In the course of listening to a song, a fan or collector can not only browse through hundreds of visual PFPs, but also quickly analyze the rarity and uniqueness of these visual assets within the same collection. By contrast, assessing the rarity of a particular audio file (such as inferring slight variations between different sources) may not be so intuitive, at least for everyday consumers.

Also, a large part of the culture around visually generative/PFP NFTs is a profile picture that can be used as a self-presentation on Twitter, Discord, and other social platforms, especially NFTs designed by human or human-like characters like BAYC and CryptoPunks . But in most cases, mainstream social platforms do not support music or audio as PFP.

These limitations also lead to the question: what exactly does the holder of the generative music NFT identify with: audio? visual? A follow-up DAO? Or maybe the artist behind the project himself? A human-shaped visual layer for generative/PFP music NFTs may be a potential solution to push the project to a wider audience, which would appear more "affinity" to ordinary fans, especially those who are already familiar with BAYC . For example, the interactive, generative music NFT project WarpSound (above) uses a virtual, human or human-like group of DJs to perform and output music. While most other similar projects, the visual layer output is just some abstract art.

02 Lack of legal recourse

If you don't embrace the "Remix" culture "Remix"), it would be difficult for the visual PFP world to be as successful as it is today - i.e. at least giving NFT owners some commercial rights to commercialize their tokens. One of the clearest examples of this dynamic is the BAYC community, where owners have full commercial rights over any NFT they own. Today, you can find APEs on t-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, comic strips and countless other products, not to mention in the new supergroups under Universal Music Group. This openness to derivative IP has helped BAYC become one of the most economically successful NFT projects of all time.

(Importantly, not all PFP projects share this mindset. For example, the creators of CryptoPunks retain the sole right to monetize the project, while the owners of CryptoKitty can only make money from their own artwork each year Earn $100,000 in sales in a commercial version. But even this entitlement is not strictly enforced, and more limited projects often fail to generate more revenue in the wider community. It seems that most PFP projects have identified that, Brand expansion and awareness are more important than IP protection).

There are some early, small-scale proofs of concept regarding music NFTs’ open approach to derivative works. For example, the Async platform enables collectors to own NFTs that represent the right to alter specific merged tracks in the final master of a song at any given time, and then purchase NFT "prints" of different combinations of those merged tracks (similar to the previous Described EulerBeats' creation and printing mode). Projects like Audioglyphs and EulerBeats also give original NFT holders commercial rights to related songs as long as they hold the original token.

However, such terms often rely heavily on trust, or are built on the inherent assumption that none of the collectors in the community are bad guys. In actual implementation, the link between the right to use intellectual property rights and the ownership of the token is quite loose, even if this link is actually being enforced. For this reason, scaling the derivative monetization model around generative music NFTs to the level of mainstream music culture will be a huge legal challenge, especially in a way that integrates with traditional music copyright holders.

In fact, even before Web3 and NFTs are considered, the legal issues surrounding generative music creation are an understatement. In most countries, there is no legal standard to say exactly who should be credited for a song that contains AI in the composition or production process, and the software used in the process? Human producers of the original bounce or source footage? Or some combination of the two? Who is the "legitimate" copyright owner? When it comes to generating music NFTs specifically, tokens will only amplify rather than eliminate the deep-rooted legal complexities in the music industry - a trend given that PFP projects are generally free to acquire intellectual property from each other without legal recourse Perhaps overlooked by the strong anti-copyright ethos of the Web3 community.

Conclusion: Creativity as its own (economic) reward

Genesis - HOLLY+ Speaking Mode 1 / Genesis - HOLLY+ Original Vocal Mode 1

At the end of the day, the needs of consumers/fans around generating music NFTs – and the economic model and value – have yet to be proven for a variety of reasons. However, for now at least, much of the music/Web3 ecosystem is focused on building infrastructure centered on the well-being of artists, and these limitations act as a shield against speculation.

Visual PFP projects like BAYC and CryptoPunks have been successful not only because they have built a shared community and sense of identity, but also because they have become tradable assets with some financial utility. In some cases, this has led to a highly speculative nature in the digital art market. But the inherent character of music and the function it plays in society makes it arguably unlikely to follow the same speculative line.

Therefore, as a concluding remark, it is now to think about what kind of new business model can support the next wave of generation of music NFTs, and at the same time, it is not only based on financial speculation.

For artists in this ecosystem (and in the long run, maybe any artist in Web3), "hype" NFTs may be the wrong model. Conversely, generative music NFT projects can focus more on building long-term models, earning passive income for original artists, while also empowering collectors to build their businesses and creative works around the token. Holly+ has adopted this approach on their own auction house on Zora (screenshot above), where anyone can submit artwork made using the Holly+ voice model for possible inclusion in the 1/1 NFT collection on the Holly+ DAO platform . 50% of the profits from the sale of these crowdsourced NFTs will be split with contributing artists, 40% will go to the Holly+ DAO treasury to fund the new tool, and 10% will go to Holly Herndon as compensation for using her digital portrait.

Bringing generative music NFT projects to artists and the music industry, not just fans, may be a potentially interesting financial opportunity to tokenize the underlying creative process alongside any discrete creative output. "We are interested in researching how to use NFTs and tokens to tokenize generative music workflows, templates, and datasets," Ali said, referring to open-source, off-chain resources for aggregating generative art models, such as Inspired by Pollinations.Ai. “You can use a token to access certain art datasets, or you can buy an artist’s NFT to license the creative software used to generate that artwork.”

This monetization model is reminiscent of Eno's conception of composers as bottom-up gardeners (as opposed to top-down architects), and how this distinction re-imagines Web3 art Definition - Not only providing finished creative products, but also providing seeds for NFT collectors and other artists to create and monetize derivative works.

"We think this is the way the NFT format pushes the art forward, just as the development of recording technology created the concept of the recording artist, the actual recording of the music is as much art as the notes or lyrics of the music." Synthopia (one by Gramatik "If NFTs make the economics of generating music work, we think it can have the same impact," the team behind the generative music NFT project launched by the , Luxas and Audioglyphs platforms told us in a statement.

From an artist's point of view, this may be the ultimate unlock of Web3 in the music industry in the long run - not only to consider the short-term financial opportunities, but also to consider the deeper and more profound aspects that blockchain and decentralization have opened up for the entire artistic creation. Cutting-edge fields for which any financial benefits are just icing on the cake.

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